Thursday, February 4, 2016

An increasing number of nonprofit organizations are relying on satellite imagery to monitor environmental degradation.Chief among them is SkyTruth, which has used this data to expose the extent of the BP oil spill, uncover mining damage, and track illegal fishing worldwide.

When Brian Schwartz, a Johns Hopkins University epidemiologist researching the public health impacts of hydraulic fracturing, read about an environmental group that uses satellite imagery and aerial photography to track environmental degradation, he was intrigued.

It was the summer of 2013, and the group, SkyTruth, had just launched a crowdsourcing project on its website to map fracking activity in Pennsylvania.
The site provided volunteers with U.S. government aerial images from across the state and a brief tutorial on how to identify fracking locations.
Within a month, more than 200 volunteers sorted through 9,000 images to pinpoint 2,724 fracking wellpads.
Schwartz ended up using this data in a study published last October in the journal Epidemiology, showing that women living near hydraulic fracturing sites in 40 Pennsylvania counties faced a significantly elevated risk of giving birth prematurely.

That’s precisely the sort of result that John Amos, SkyTruth’s president, envisioned when he founded the group in 2001.
He has since become part data analyst, part environmental advocate, and part satellite-imagery proselytizer as he looks for ways to use remote sensing to call attention to little-noticed environmental damage.
This month, SkyTruth’s website is displaying a map showing the global prevalence of flaring, the wasteful and carbon-spewing oil industry practice of burning natural gas and other drilling byproducts.
Through most of December, SkyTruth and another satellite-focused nonprofit, Moscow-based Transparent World,
displayed images of a burning oil platform and a 2,300-barrel oil slick
in the Caspian Sea.
The platform’s owner, Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil
company, SOCAR, denied that any spill had occurred.

In the 5 years since BP, there have been nearly 10,000 spills reported in the Gulf of Mexico

SkyTruth’s defining moment came in 2010, when Amos — analyzing satellite
photographs — sounded the alarm that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in
the Gulf of Mexico was far larger than the petroleum company, BP, and
the U.S. government were acknowledging.
“If you can see it,” says SkyTruth’s motto, displayed at the top of its website, “you can change it.”

One indication of SkyTruth’s influence is a cautionary headline that
appeared after SkyTruth formed a partnership with Google and the
nonprofit Oceana in November 2014 to launch a system called Global Fishing Watch,
which uses the satellite transponders found aboard most large fishing
vessels to track the activities of the world’s fishing fleets.
“Big
Brother is watching,” warned World Fishing & Aquaculture, a trade journal.

That admonition could be extended to all the extractive industries — oil
and gas, mining, logging, and fishing — whose operations can be tracked
by remote sensing.
A growing number of governments now conduct
environmental observation by satellite, including Brazil, which monitors
deforestation in the Amazon.
And environmental groups now commonly use
remote sensing tools.
One prominent example is Global Forest Watch,
a system launched two years by Washington-based World Resources
Institute to monitor logging and fires in the world’s forests.
Russia-based Transparent World employs satellite imagery for many
purposes, including monitoring of protected areas and observing the
impacts of dam construction.

Amos, 52, says he considered himself an environmentalist even while he
spent a decade working for oil and gas companies as a satellite imagery
analyst looking for drilling sites.
He quit in 2000 to start a
non-profit that would apply his skills to environmental protection.
For
years he ran SkyTruth from the basement of his Shepherdstown, West
Virginia home on an annual budget of less than $100,000, and he still speaks of “begging” satellite images from commercial providers.

Although SkyTruth has expanded in recent years to eight employees
supported by a $600,000 budget, it is still tiny, particularly compared
to the U.S. government’s massive satellite resources.
Nevertheless, SkyTruth has
delved into realms that the government has avoided.
One reason, Amos
says, is that satellite imagery analysis is so unfamiliar that “nobody
has known what to ask for” — thus, one of SkyTruth’s missions is to show
what’s possible.
Its usual method is to release a trove of
environment-related data, then invite researchers and crowdsource
amateurs to analyze it.

SkyTruth has benefited enormously from the explosion in the last 15
years in satellite imagery and other digital technologies.
When Amos
started SkyTruth, a single Landsat satellite image cost $4,400; now the
entire U.S. government collection— more than 4.7 million images and
growing daily— is available free of charge.
Not only have satellites and
satellite imagery become cheap, but the capacity to analyze, duplicate,
send, and store satellite data has expanded by orders of magnitude.
In
fact, satellite technology is now considered a subset of a larger field,
geospatial intelligence, which has tens of thousands of practitioners
around the world employing an array of optical, thermal, radar, and
radiometric remote sensing tools.
“It’s evolved from a problem of getting imagery to deciding which image
do I want to pluck out of this massive cloud,” Amos told me.

The finding by Schwartz, the Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, on premature
births suggests a correlation between fracking and poor human health;
but because the chemical trigger wasn’t identified, the link isn’t
regarded as causal.
From more than 1,000 available chemicals, fracking
operators select a dozen or so that fit the geological challenges of a
particular site.
People living near the site typically can’t find out
whether their wells and aquifers have been contaminated because the cost
of testing for all 1,000 chemicals is prohibitive, and operators treat
each site’s chemical recipe as a trade secret.

The quandary led Amos to venture beyond satellite imagery into the
larger field of geospatial data. Along with several better-known
environmental groups, SkyTruth argued for disclosure of the recipe used
at each frackingsite.
Two industry lobbying groups, the American Petroleum Institute and
America’s Natural Gas Alliance, defused mounting Congressional pressure
for mandatory disclosure by launching a website, FracFocus,
where operators could post their recipes voluntarily.
But soon after
the site’s launch in 2011, users found that information posted on it was
entered in the wrong field, misspelled chemical trade names, or omitted
key facts deemed proprietary.
The site thwarted researchers by
requiring postings in a format that computers couldn’t read.
Although 23
states require fracking companies to use FracFocus to disclose their
chemical use, a 2013 Harvard Law School report concluded that FracFocus’ “fails as a regulatory compliance tool.”

SkyTruth’s lead programmer, Paul Woods, devised a way around some of
FracFocus’ barriers by writing software that “scraped” all the chemical
data from the tens of thousands of reports posted on the site.
Then he
posted it in a database on SkyTruth’s website.
In addition, under
pressure from SkyTruth, other environmental groups, and an Energy
Department advisory board, FracFocus agreed to make its data available
in machine-readable form beginning in May 2015.
These developments have
yielded more and more information for researchers, such as Schwartz, who
are investigating fracking’s health impact.
“This is a very wonky issue that makes people’s eyes glaze over,” Amos
said.
“But it’s where the rubber meets the road in terms of
understanding if fracking is bad for you.”

The first time that SkyTruth attracted national attention was in April
2010, when Amos received a Google alert that an oil platform called
Deepwater Horizon, 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, had exploded and
burned.
Amos knew explosions like this one were uncommon and usually led
to spills.

He began searching for satellite photos, but the first ones he found
were obscured by clouds. Meanwhile, BP, which leased the rig, and the
Coast Guard, echoing BP, maintained that the ruptured well beneath the
rig was leaking oil at a rate of 1,000 barrels a day— a major spill but
perhaps not a catastrophic one.
The number was vital, for it would help
determine the scale and strategy of the leak containment effort, the
eventual cost to BP in fines and damages, and the scope of preparations
for the next spill.

It took Amos six days to acquire clear images.
His first thought, he
says, was: “Oh my God! This is much bigger than anybody realizes.”
He
calculated that the slick was 50 miles long and covered 817 square miles.
He outlined the slick, along with his calculations, and posted
both on SkyTruth’s website.

Within a day, Ian MacDonald, a Florida State University oceanographer
and oil slick authority, notified Amos that the leak’s flow rate was
much bigger than a thousand barrels a day.
Using Amos’ calculations of
the lick’s size and conservative assumptions about its thickness, MacDonald
concluded that it was “not unreasonable” that the leak was 20 times BP’s
initial estimate.
Undermined by SkyTruth’s numbers, the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration conceded the next day that BP’s
initial estimate was too low: over BP’s public objections, NOAA revised
the government estimate to 5,000 barrels a day.
Two months later, —
prodded, in part, by SkyTruth — government scientists concluded that the
initial flow rate was 62,000 barrels a day, 62 times BP’s initial
estimate.

SkyTruth has also affected the course of mountaintop removal coal
mining.
Appalachian states have issued hundreds of permits for
mountaintop removal mines, but they’ve rarely checked to see whether the
mines have stayed within the permitted boundaries.
Permits are supposed
to be issued only after assessing impacts on downstream waterways, and a
study of ten West Virginia counties published in 2004 by the state’s
environmental protection department found that nearly 40 percent of
mines in ten counties were situated outside permitted locations.

Acting on a request from Appalachian Voices,
a North Carolina-based nonprofit that opposes mountaintop removal
mining, SkyTruth devised a technique for identifying the mines from
satellite images, then mapped their growth over three decades and posted
the results on its website in 2009.
The information was used in six
peer-reviewed academic articles, including a Duke University study that
found that once five percent of a watershed is mined, water quality in
its rivers and streams usually fails to meet state standards.
That study
in turn provided empirical backing for the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency’s 2011 revocation of a mine permit
in West Virginia that had been issued by the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers.
The decision marked the first time the EPA had ever reversed a
coal mine’s permit under the Clean Water Act.

This June 21 2014 satellite photo from NASA, annotated by SkyTruth, shows an oil slick extending in an arc at least 8.3 miles (13.4 km) long from a well site at a Taylor Energy Co. platform that was toppled in an underwater mudslide triggered by Hurricane Ivan's waves in September 2004.

In search of images that tell environmental stories, SkyTruth pays close
attention to news reports, but occasionally it finds stories of its own.
One example is what is probably the Gulf of Mexico’s longest-running
commercial oil spill, at the site of a rig destroyed by an underwater
mudslide during Hurricane Ivan in 2004.
The slide buried 28 wells on the
sea floor under 100 feet of mud, which made sealing them extremely
difficult.
The rig’s owner, Taylor Energy Company, went bankrupt trying.
Amos discovered the leaks in 2010 while studying Hurricane Katrina’s
impacts, and has been sounding an alarm ever since.
The leaks have
trickled steadily into the Gulf’s waters since 2004 at a rate Amos
estimates at between one and 20 barrels a day, creating a slick that is
sometimes 20 miles long.
The wells are ten miles offshore in federally
managed water, but no federal agency has tried to seal the leak.

Given the controversial issues SkyTruth has been involved with, the
group has attracted surprisingly little criticism, perhaps because so
much of its work is grounded in visual data— for SkyTruth, seeing really
is believing.
A notable exception occurred in 2009 when Amos testified
at a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing on the under-appreciated risks of
deepwater oil drilling.
Senator Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat,
attacked Amos for overlooking the oil industry’s safety record and
economic benefits.
“You do a great disservice by not telling the
American people the truth about drilling and putting it in the
perspective it deserves,” Landrieu told Amos.

Landrieu didn’t give Amos a chance to respond, but, as it turned out, he
didn’t have to.
The BP spill occurred five months later.